The printing of pictures captured using a digital camera on a digital printer such as an electrophotographic or inkjet printer is well known. Photographers have, for decades, made enlargements of photographs or panoramic prints. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,289,229 (Manico) discloses an apparatus for printing full frame or panoramic prints from negatives from a roll of film. Manico teaches measuring the density at a multitude of points on the negative to determine if the print is to be a full frame or a panoramic print. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,502,541 (Olliver) teaches the use of a printer to distinguish between full frame prints and panoramic prints interspersed with the full frame prints on a strip of film. U.S. Pat. No. 6,038,977 (Haney) teaches the use of a template to align prints. U.S. Pat. No. 6,246,413 (Teo) teaches a method of producing a panoramic print whereby the image of a panoramic scene is altered to allow it to be mapped to a surface. U.S. Pat. No. 7,705,908 (Fredlund et al.) teach a camera operating parameter to compare images in a camera to determine common elements. U.S. Publication No. 2007/0273767 (Kim) teaches a method of producing a panoramic print from a mobile device such as a cell phone by creating a markup document.
Producing panoramic prints using professional equipment is a relatively straight forward process. Cameras are mounted to a mounting system that fixes the orientation of the camera along both the horizontal or X-direction and the vertical or Y-direction. After capturing a first view to form a digital file of the first view, the camera is precisely rotated to capture a second view with a controlled or known amount of overlap between the first and second view. When printing the views to form a panoramic print, the precision of the views allows printing without having to perform complicated adjustments for image overlap. Thus, a first and second electronic file corresponding to the digital information corresponding to the first and second view can be directly inputted into a printer to produce the panoramic print. Additional views can also be captured to create a larger panoramic view. The files must also be suitable scaled to allow prints to be produced on receivers such as paper of a selected size.
Producing panoramic prints from views and digital files captured using consumer grade cameras is more problematic. Specific issues include 1) the cameras are often hand held and 2) even if a mounting system such as a tripod is used to stabilize the camera, the mounting systems does not have any means to precisely change the orientation of the camera. As a result, the captured views and the digital files resulting from the captured views can have variable regions of overlap between the captured views. In addition, the ability to maintain the precise horizontal positioning of the camera is limited. Thus, there may be relative tilting between the first and second views captured by a consumer grade digital camera. If more than two views are captured to create a panoramic print, these problems are compounded. Finally, the size of the panoramic print must be adjusted, according to the size of the paper available and the desires of the operator, to produce a panoramic print of the desired size. It should be noted that the final panoramic print may be printed on multiple sheets of receiver and that final scaling must be done to allow the displayed print to have a consistent border and not have undesirable projections or absences of printed views on the final print.
A method is needed to combine digital files from a simple image or view capture device to produce an electronic file corresponding to a panoramic image. A method is also needed to allow digital files capturing views or images on a simple image capture device to be combines so that they can be printed on a printer to produce a panoramic print.